Welcome to tree-thinking.org

This site is designed to be a resource for teachers,
students, and researchers who are interested in tree thinking. It
contains materials for teaching and learning about evolutionary
relationships and the use of phylogenies in biological problem solving.
Many of the files are stored locally but there are also annotated links
to many things housed elsewhere. The site is currently undergoing some
revisions to make it easier to use and more interactive. If you would
like to receive an e-mail when the site is upgraded, suggest a resource
to include, or make a comment please send me an e-mail. <sdonovan@pitt.edu>

Featured resource

Summary from publisher:
Phylogenetic trees are widely used to study the relationships among
living species and genes. In their Perspective, Baum et al. discuss how
it has become apparent that trees are commonly misunderstood, leading
to confusion about the concept of common ancestry. Although
challenging, tree thinking should be taught as an element of evolution
training at all levels.

Two tree-thinking quizzes were published as supplemental materials to
this paper.

About the tree thinking group

The Tree Thinking Group is a loose association of people, including
researchers, teachers and students, who are interested in teaching and
learning evolutionary biology effectively. There are, of course, many
groups that are interested in improving evolution education and you can
find out about some of them on our resource
pages. What makes this effort stand out somewhat is our focus
on tree thinking
— that is, the use of a phylogenetic perspective for making
sense of biology. We are just getting started but you can browse some
of the products that
are currently available and under development. This site is currently
being coordinated by Sam Donovan at the University of Pittsburgh and
you should feel free to contact
him if you have questions, comments, suggestions, or you would like to
get updates on the project.

Site developments

November, 2005 - Preparing major
overhaul

June, 2005 - Major content
updates

November 10 - Public debut
of Tree Thinking Group site, ver. 1.0.

August 25 - Search function
moved to a separate page. Added new links, and made links more uniform
in appearance.

July 15/17 - Overhaul of pages
upgrade to ver. 0.5, along with typo fixes and other minor corrections.
New search function added and functional. Please feel free to use it.
Send comments or bug reports to the web manager.

June 1 - Links section had
a major revamp. Almost in "complete" working order.

May 27, 2004 - Preliminary launch,
ver. 0.1. Everything barring the Links section should be working. Still
gathering links and working the bugs out. These bugs are nothing like cicadas,
and should be fixed soon.